TV Quickshots #30

Letterkenny (CraveTV; 2016)

A sophisticated Canadian small-town comedy of maximal linguistic inventiveness and expert deadpan timing, Letterkenny comes across as being scripted by a particularly foul-mouthed Tom Stoppard, to paraphrase a colleague. In fact, it’s the creation of Jared Keeso (best-known to Canadian television audiences for his Gemini-winning role as hockey-commentating demagogue Don Cherry in a pair of CBC TV movies), who also stars as poker-faced semi-farmer local tough guy Wayne. Keeso co-wrote the six-episode initial season with Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky), who also directs and appears as the barely-closeted local preacher, and the former draws extensively from his youth experiences in Listowel, Ontario (population 6,867) for the comic scenarios, oddball characters, and nigh-impenetrable slang dialogue of Letterkenny (which is itself an Ontario town, albeit a ghost town).

Much of Letterkenny, especially in its early episodes, consists of Wayne and his buddies (Nathan Dales, K. Trevor Wilson, and Michelle Mylett as his attractive sister Katy) reclining on the family farm – next to a dust-collecting produce stand, on the porch, in the dining room, or in front of the barn – and shooting the breeze in colloquial language so colourful as to make Trailer Park Boys seem bowdlerized in comparison. These scenes alternate with and sometimes cross paths with sequences featuring a group of local black-clad, alternative-culture “skids” led by Stewart (Tyler Johnston) as well as the dense hockey lingo of local junior players Reilly (Dylan Playfair) and Jonesy (Andrew Herr). The latter figures especially function on the sidelines of the main episode plots as hilarious Shakespearean clowns, going on extended runs of jargon-y jock braggadocio about working out, scoring goals, and scoring girls while doing little or none of the above. Their material is likewise drawn from Keeso’s experiences, as he himself played hockey extensively in Ontario’s lower junior leagues.

Letterkenny infuses small-town hick life with a rapid-fire complexity of expression that one associates with cosmopolitan urbanity, or perhaps it simply uncovers and amplifies a complexity of expression that was already there in the rural context, waiting to be given a proper artistic voicing. Keese and Tierney patiently tease out running jokes over the six episodes before resolving them very enjoyably in the finale (there’s a slowly-growing tale of two locals who allegedly committed carnal acts with an ostrich with a particularly glorious drawn-out punchline). Tierney utilizes his experience and skill as a prolific under-the-radar Canadian filmmaker to compose the Sudbury-shot Letterkenny in a series of symetrically-framed shots reminiscent of the po-faced comedies of Jared Hess or snatches of Wes Anderson.

But it’s the dialogue that hums and crackles, an inspired rough-hewn music of yokel expressiveness that punctuates in laughter coaxed out as much in appreciation of the sheer creativity of its constituent words as on the strength of its zingers or punchlines. Even if Letterkenny sometimes calls out for subtitles (which the streaming platform which commissioned and shows it, Bell Media’s CraveTV, does not provide), it’s an excellent and linguistically unpredictable slice of a certain kind of vestigial rural Canadian life that frequently makes for our country’s most notable television comedy. I dare you to watch the first episode’s cold open below and summon the fortitude to give this inspired Canuck comedy a “hard no”.